Inside the cooler: Pre-fresh hop party

Naturally it is the female hop plant that adds the complexity, flavor and floral aroma to an otherwise grainy, saccharine milkshake.

Hop Vines

In our over-modernized and industrial world,
we rarely require patience to get some good or service we want; in our Portland
bubble of local, fresh and hand crafted, we are coddled in a blanket of
authentic and overdetermined food options. But every now and then, we're
brought back to our humble place in our slowly revolving universe. Fresh Hop
Beer drinking is one of those moments.

The end of August and beginning of September
marks the time of year when those delicate, green, miniature paper pinecones
must be harvested. The tiny hop is the female flower of a vine that grows up to 25 feet. Naturally it is the female hop plant that adds the complexity, flavor and floral
aroma to an otherwise grainy, saccharine milkshake. And like women, the fresh hop beer is
ephemeral and temperamental.

To make a fresh hop beer, the hops must be
added to the beer within 24 hours of harvest, and the hop fields can't be too
far away. Delicate and temperamental, remember? Fermenting occurs anywhere
between two and four weeks, leaving October the optimal time to drink a fresh
hop beer. And if you like it, you better put a ring on it, because these beers
need to be drunk within three months.

The Beaujolais of beer, like a ballet,
requires intense labor and perfect timing before making its debut on the big
stage. For the fresh hop, let's go back to the land. Sodbuster Farms is a
fourth generation, family-owned hop farm, where Full Sail Brewing sources its
hops. A few lucky folks took a hop tour to fully appreciate this transient time
of year.

In the field, the hops grow two stories high
and are attached to wires, making vineyards

Lorax of Hops

look Lilliputian. Workers go along
the rows with machetes and hack free the bottom of the bines—hop vines.
Enormous machines, reminiscent of the Lorax, follow behind and separate the vines
from the wires. As the vines are cut, they fall into the back of trucks that
are at the ready. When one truck is full, there is an almost seamless
transition as the full truck passes the baton to the ones waiting in the ranks.
In all, it takes about an hour to harvest one acre of hops. At this crucial
time of year, this is a round-the-clock operation.

Processing the hop vines begin the moment
the trucks enter the facility, which isn't far away from the fields. While the
steel mechanisms and conveyer belts detract from a vision of bucolic harvest,
one simply needs to close her eyes and breathe in the piney, lemony, fresh
parchment smell enveloping the facility. This is the sensation that the Fresh
Hop Beer hopes to capture.

Processing Hop Vines

A track across the ceiling has hooks to
which the long, hop vines are attached, and vine by vine they go through a
machine that strips the hops, dropping them onto a conveyer belt below.

Fresh hop beer is made from the hops that
come straight from the farm. Other than packaging, this is the extent to
which fresh hops are processed for fresh hop beer. The brewery gets some hops
that are not dried and sent straight to them.

The remainder of hops are then dried. They
get conveyed into a dryer where they sit for four hours. Next they are
transported onto the floor where a bobcat then pushes them into another
conveyor, which leads to the bailer. Here they are shipped somewhere else to be
packaged or directly to the brewery to use. They are kept cold after
being bailed.

Look for Fresh Hop beers by Full Sail, Long
Brewing, and

Stone Brewing, and Bridgeport's Fresh Hop Pilsner among others.
These selections and many more can be found in Portland at Uptown Market.http://www.uptownmarketpdx.com/